Chapter 2
The three essential nutrients of modern people—aren’t they said to be caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol?
Among them, the most important nutrient for Shin Hye-joo, an ordinary South Korean balancing two jobs, was caffeine, hands down.
As soon as she arrived at the office, Hye-joo headed straight for the pantry instead of her desk. Getting herself properly awake was far more urgent than turning on her computer a few minutes earlier.
Pouring a 150-won sugar-laden instant coffee mix into her tumbler, adding a tiny splash of hot water, and packing it with ice to brew her special iced coffee mix, Hye-joo walked out of the pantry with her eyes half-open.
Thinking she should at least snap out of it while standing there, she downed the coffee in one gulp, but Manager Kim—the enemy of everyone—stopped right in front of her on his way into work.
With a balding head, a broad, flat face, and to top it all off, sexual jokes that he dropped out of nowhere at any given time, he was the kind of person who made people want to run away.
Hiding her urge to take a step back immediately, Hye-joo raised a mechanical smile.
“Assistant Manager Lee, why are you always yawning like that? Did your boyfriend tire you out late last night?”
“Haha, I really told you I don’t have a boyfriend.”
She said that, but it was true that she had been held captive all night long.
Not by a person, but by a keyboard and a monitor.
Every night, Hye-joo wrote 19+ commercial novels while imagining a man’s facial features, his penis size, and a colorful variety of sexual positions between a man and a woman. Because she was hugging the nape of an imaginary man’s neck every single night while draining every last bit of her energy, she was at the point of wondering if she needed to get some traditional herbal medicine prescribed.
Perhaps because she was active as a 19+ romance novel author, her train of thought flowed toward stimulating things as if paralyzed.
Whenever she saw the Korean consonants ‘ㅅㄱ’, instead of words like ‘thinking’ (saeng-gak), words like ‘genitals’ (seong-gi), ‘undergarments’ (sok-got), ‘world of lust’ (saek-gye), and ‘erogenous zone’ (seong-gam) would just line up in her head one after another.
Hye-joo was a romance novel fanatic. Since she loved it, it was only natural that she challenged the path of becoming an author.
Reviewing romance novels—and 19+ novels at that—without a single dating experience was a grueling chore. In her head, she was always hugging someone, but in reality, her arms were empty.
So, it made sense that she couldn’t come up with the male lead’s dialogue.
“Haa… I wish I could sit Team Leader Cha in front of me while I write. Asking him what he would reply in this kind of situation.”
The moment she muttered that and stepped out of the pantry, of all things, didn’t a pleasant scent brush past the tip of her nose?
It was none other than him walking past her. Holding a tumbler filled with good-smelling Americano, glancing down at her from his tall height.
Cha Woo-seok’s impression was chilly as always.
His hair, always neatly arranged, and his wrinkle-free shirt and suit were flawless.
Above all, his beautiful face was completely devoid of any laughter. Just a brush of his low-cast gaze made one’s body shrink instinctively. It felt as though she was about to get scolded even though she had done nothing wrong.
…And for some reason, it also made her feel like she wanted to be scolded.
As his gaze brushed past, Hye-joo’s slender five fingers instinctively gripped her tumbler tightly.
“Assistant Manager Shin Hye-joo.”
“Ye-yes?”
“Didn’t you call me?”
Hye-joo raised her head and cautiously read his expression as she looked up at him, who stood a whole head taller than her. Fortunately, Team Leader Cha didn’t seem to have heard her properly.
“Ah, that was meant to be a greeting… G-good morning, Team Leader Cha!”
As she bent her waist 90 degrees to give a polite bow and hide her bright red face, Woo-seok responded with a plain, “Yes,” and leisurely vanished from her field of vision. It was a cold attitude that ordinary people might gossip about, calling it rude and obnoxious.
Even so, the problem was that his cold, expressionless face looked way too sexy to Hye-joo.
Thinking that, Hye-joo’s face turned pale.
…What am I thinking right now? About the Team Leader! And in broad daylight, at the company! Hye-joo covered her mouth, reproaching herself for being so unwholesome. They say you become like the company you keep. Because Hye-joo was thoroughly corrupted and steeped in those kinds of novels, her bad habit of imagining hot scenes showed no signs of going away easily.
This was all the adverse effect of keeping text-boyfriends close.
Despite that, Hye-joo’s eyes couldn’t break away from Team Leader Cha Woo-seok’s back as it grew further away.
Team Leader Cha Woo-seok, who was as cold as a frozen lake in the dead of winter.
He was the unrequited crush of Shin Hye-joo, a virgin who learned about romance through books, and the protagonist of her novel.
[Eun-ji: Are you here, our Assistant Manager Hye-joo?]
[Hye-joo: Yep, I have arrived, Assistant Manager Eun-ji~ Fortunately, I barely made it safe today too~]
[Eun-ji: I already printed out all the data~ Hye-joo just needs to take it]
[Hye-joo: I absolutely love you! Thank you!]
[Eun-ji: Ahh, I hate working so much ㅜㅜ Is it the Monday blues…]
[Hye-joo: Me too…ㅠㅠ]
Tap-tap-tap, with blank eyes, she typed at a fast speed befitting a novelist, sending a tired cat emoticon sucking on coffee along with the text. It was a personal messenger, not the company’s official one.
But of all things, he walked past behind her again. That Cha Woo-seok.
…It wasn’t like she was slacking off.
With a crying face, Hye-joo’s shoulders slumped. Somehow, nothing was going right today.
Since there were no important schedules except for a presentation right before lunch, her morning hours after that were mostly spent handling work emails that had piled up over the weekend.
In the midst of that, Hye-joo seemed particularly immersed in her work compared to usual, which was because she had shown an unsightly side of herself to her unrequited crush, Team Leader Cha, in front of the pantry. She tried to erase that scene from her mind somehow by focusing on work, but it wasn’t easy.
Besides, she would see him soon at the presentation anyway, and seeing his face would vividly revive that shame, so it was all pointless.
When it was time for the presentation and the entire marketing team gathered, the meeting room became bustling. Eun-ji, who could be called her only ally in the marketing team of SJ Group—a male-dominated company—secretly sent Hye-joo words of encouragement.
Hye-joo put on a serious expression, gathered her hands neatly, and began the presentation in an earnest voice. There was nothing difficult about it since she had perfectly finished preparing for the presentation well in advance. Except for the fact that her heart wouldn’t calm down at all because Team Leader Cha was sitting right in front of her nose.
“…With this, I will conclude the presentation. Do you happen to have any questions regarding this? …If there are none…”
A low voice cut off Hye-joo’s words.
“I have a question. It will be troublesome if difficult questions come up during the executive meeting, so think of this as practicing in advance.”
It was none other than Woo-seok.
Knowing that his question would pierce through sharply, the marketing team members rolled their eyes. Several weeks of overtime depended on Hye-joo’s mouth.
Beads of sweat formed on the temples of Hye-joo, who was pretending to be calm, and an alarm bell began to ring inside her head.
Team Leader Cha Woo-seok rarely asked questions, but once he did, he would hold on and dig in so tenaciously that it would make the other person cry, making it confusing whether this was a discussion or a Q&A session.
Hye-joo moistened her dry lips and prepared herself mentally, trying hard to erase the sentences from her novel that popped into her head whenever she looked at Team Leader Cha.
Whether he knew this or not, Woo-seok looked at Hye-joo with a sharp gaze and asked.
“Competitors are also aiming for the same target. I understand the strengths well, but our own differentiation point isn’t clearly visible.”
“Our company’s app provides a… uh, climax that other companies cannot give.”
“…A climax?”
“Yes. A climax, so to speak, that makes people want to log in again.”
“Please speak more specifically.”
Due to the aftermath of her writing last night, words from 19+ novels were firmly lodged in her head, making her choice of vocabulary difficult. However, Hye-joo, to whom the use of such vocabulary felt as natural as flowing water, didn’t realize that she was answering while exuding a subtle nuance.
“Unlike other companies that target those in their 40s and older, our app targets the young 2030 generation. I will appeal to the fact that it has a… ugh, tight, gripping charm that makes them want to keep doing it.”
“If the initial marketing response to the app falls short of expectations, do you have a countermeasure?”
“It’s simple. I will increase the exposure to bring the response back up.”
“Exposure?”
“Ah, the app’s exposure. On the advertising side.”
“…Understood.”
The team leader, who had been raising his eyebrows and pausing as if he had something to say about Hye-joo’s answers, twirled his pen, lightly tapped the paper, and set it down.
It seemed she had successfully gotten through the crisis.
Hye-joo swept her hand over her chest, barely holding back a sigh of relief that wanted to burst out right away.
“Anyway, since I have prepared all the presentation materials for the executives for the interim report, you only need to do the finishing touches. Inserting graphs, refining charts, and the like. The preparation will be…”
A cold gaze swept through the meeting room. The poor employee who received a death sentence right before lunch was…
“…Assistant Manager Shin Hye-joo, you carry on with it.”
…Regrettably, it was none other than Shin Hye-joo herself.
